The religious right is breaking up over Israel and Iran |
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The religious right is breaking up over Israel and Iran
The MAGA civil war over the Iran war is opening up new and old religious and political feuds.
Nearly a month into the joint US-Israeli war on Iran, there’s a good chance you’ve heard something about the apparent civil war on the right over the conflict. Though polling shows steady support for President Donald Trump from his MAGA base, the war has been tearing apart the MAGAsphere, pitting disenchanted MAGA influencers against fervent pro-Trump and pro-Israel loyalists.
The seeds of this split were apparent even before the US and Israel launched their first strikes, when Tucker Carlson, of the America First, Israel-skeptical, anti-interventionist wing of the party, interviewed Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Israel and fervent pro-Israel activist, on Carlson’s podcast last month. Huckabee argued that, as a Christian Zionist, he believed the Bible showed that God had promised not just Israel, but large portions of the Middle East, to the Jewish people. Carlson argued it wasn’t a valid basis for a modern state, and accused Israel of dragging the US into war with Iran.
There are cracks emerging in the diverse coalition of America’s religious right — accelerated in the past weeks over the US-Israeli war on Iran.
On the surface, these disagreements have to do with differences over what different Christians believe “Israel” means in their teachings.
2028 GOP presidential hopefuls are now getting implicated — by either injecting themselves into the discourse, as Ted Cruz did, or by getting called out, like Vice President JD Vance.
These debates are also forcing difficult conversations among Catholics about their place in the GOP and their relationship with Jewish people.
As their conversation suggested, there’s a religious dimension to this emerging rift on the right:
Huckabee is an evangelical Christian, a group that is overwhelmingly pro-Israel. Carlson, like many of the biggest critics of both the US relationship with Israel and the Iran war, is not.
Since their interview, this divide has exploded into public view as a political, theological, and policy argument across multiple fronts that’s drawn in everyone from likely 2028 presidential candidates, to popular influencers, to top religious leaders. The most explosive fights have centered on the relationship between conservative Catholics and the GOP’s dominant evangelical base.
How these play out will have implications not just for inter-religious understanding in the US, but for the future of the Republican Party, and by extension American politics.
An emerging rift in the Trump political coalition
Until recently, the story of the religious right had largely been about increasing cooperation to defend traditional values in a secularizing world. This political effort created interdenominational alliances within the Republican Party: evangelicals, Catholics, Mormons, and Orthodox Jews found each other allied on issues like gay marriage, abortion, education, and protections for religious dissenters. In the Bush years, almost the entire GOP was united around confronting Islamic terrorism, an issue where Israel was seen as a leading ally.
But in recent years, this relationship has come into question. Trump’s hedonistic personal style expanded the party tent to more secular voters with their own divergent interests. His criticism of the Iraq War and embrace of an “America First” message helped build up voices on the right who were openly critical of US entanglements abroad, including support for Israel. And his removal of guardrails around extremist speech on the right helped pave the way for more openly antisemitic figures, which has created new tensions within the coalition.
All of these issues have been coming to a head in recent weeks, and the Iran war is likely to be a catalyst for even more tough discussions.
Emblematic of this crack-up is the case of Carrie Prejean Boller, a former model and........